February 2004

Since the links can be embedded in other pages on the weblog site it is an easy matter to create a page describing the gem that includes a link. (Or, as hard-core Manila users know, a News Item may serve even better.) Now you have a searchable page containing a description of the resource with a built-in link to the original gem.

It gets even better. Frontier/Manila server operators can add plug-in tools that provide extra features to those who create and maintain sites. One such tool is the Metadata plugin, which puts full metadata fields on the page where one creates new Manila stories – making it a relatively easy matter to add metadata to the page wrapping the resource… if you are into such things.

[Update] I failed to mention the RSS piece of this when I first posted this message. The RSS feature can automatically publicize the fact that the new object has been created an made available. Those subscribing to a site’s RSS feed will get the descriptive text for the resources with a link back to the original.

Weblog tools can provide the following:

Learning objects (by the way, I don’t like that term!) can easily be uploaded.

They can easily be incorporated into web pages on the weblog site, either by embedding or by linking to the original object.

The page containing the link or embedded object can contain descriptive material concerning the object.

Came across a couple more examples of teachers blogging with their students that look pretty interesting. First is this e-book of a Tapped-in presentation by Barbara Dieu who is a teacher in Sao Paulo, Brazil. I like how she introduces her project on her own site:

So as many of you are about to embark on the adventure of creating a web page or using a blog…here are some questions for you to consider: Does the architecture of the environement online (blog, web page, wiki, message board) affect your stds’ motivation and the way they learn, communicate, interact? Will a page with text only make students read more and pay more attention to the text ? What kind of balance should there be between design/layout and content online?

Good stuff. One quick thing I realized in going through her workshop site was that Blogger now has a notification piece built in. Did it always have that? Seems like a lifetime ago…

Can technology solve some problem in a better or more meaningful way than another, non-techie way?

In this case, I’m concerned with the following issues:

1) We spend most of our time in the classroom off in the ether of rhetorical analysis or argument structure or whatever, and there are no real outlets for them to discuss the connections between what we’re reading and what they see going on in the “real world.”

2) I want students to evaluate sources from day one–and not wait until the major research essay at the end of the semester.

3) I want to give students a little more room to roam around in their responses to the texts.

4) I want students to see themselves as taking part in a larger set of discussions, and really, in the end, to see the way that technology like Blogger goes a long way toward democratizing the publishing of what Scott Russell Sanders calls “the individual mind at work and play.”

I think it’s so cool to see more and more educators pushing their thinking and sharing the struggle. It always makes me push my own thinking on what I’m doing.
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(via OL Daily) In my Manila workshops this week we spent quite a bit of time on gems, something that hadn’t really sparked too much interest past the normal nodding of heads in the past. But this week for some reason, gems were big. (For the unManila initiated, gems are what Manila calls files like documents or .pdfs or PowerPoint presentations that you can upload to the server and then link to.) One of the questions went something like “so if I post my presentation as a gem, my colleagues can get it and use it too?” It had LOR written all over it. That’s one of the reasons I found this article interesting, especially this quote:

Blogs, and RSS in particular, exhibit a feature which is critical to future development of distributed systems, i.e. the ability to provide a unique address for an information or learning object…the discrete addressability of information objects.

I’d never really thought of it that way, but when you consider how easy it is now to upload and point to basically any file type, the potential for group archiving of lessons and best practices really is very easy. And then if you Furl it and send out an RSS feed to a site that collects similar feeds from all over… Oy…another thing to add to my list.
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Rick Barter’s comment on yesterday’s post led me to do some digging at his Conners Emerson School site and I found some really valuable resources. It’s great to see other educators thinking through this stuff to the degree Rick and his colleagues are. For instance, this page starts with

One of the challenges for this grade 8 project was the setup. We had to consider many factors such as:

It goes on to run through many of the relevant questions we have to answer about student blogging and how they are approaching the answers. For instance,

“we want discussion enabled, but not membership There is just a bit too much risk in opening this up to uncontrolled public comment.”

And so they set all of their members up manually and close it off to outsiders. There’s much more too. (He even has them using Bloglines to keep track of posts.) Aside from logistics, check out the Grade 5 Poetry Journal, the teacher sites, and the list of student blogs which are just getting started.

The best part of this is that the schools we’re finding are using Manila! I’m going to try to catch up with Michael Breidenstein from Rock Island later today and pick his brain. I’ll blog it for future reference.
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Was cruising the UserLand site trying to find an answer to why Contributing Editors don’t seem able to edit their own posts once they are published, and I came across this message from Lawrence Lee quoting Michael Breidenstein, the Director of Instructional Technology for the Rock Island School District in Illinois:

“We have found Manila to be the ideal way for teachers to publish web pages. It has caught on in Rock Island and now we have Manila sites for our athletics, organizations, administration, schools, teachers and alumni. The sites vary since almost every site has a different managing editor. We are just starting to see teachers take their sites to the next level by having students as members. I realize our site design isn’t the fanciest, but we have found Manila to be the best way to have teachers take control of the content on their sites. Our Manila workshops continue to be our most popular. All workshops are optional and the Manila classes have been attended by everyone – school board members, support staff, teachers, students, alumni and even the superintendent have learned to publish web content with Manila!”

Key to me is the “every site has a different managing editor” line, exactly what we are working toward here. I sent Michael an e-mail hoping to pick his brain.

Web log as Website
Was cruising the UserLand site trying to find an answer to why Contributing Editors don’t seem able to edit their own posts once they are published, and I came across this message from Lawrence Lee quoting Michael Breidenstein, the Director of Instructional Technology for the <a href=”http://www.risd41.org/”>Rock Island School District</a> in Illinois:

<blockquote>”We have found Manila to be the ideal way for teachers to publish web pages. It has caught on in Rock Island and now we have Manila sites for our athletics, organizations, administration, schools, teachers and alumni. The sites vary since almost every site has a different managing editor. We are just starting to see teachers take their sites to the next level by having students as members. I realize our site design isn’t the fanciest, but we have found Manila to be the best way to have teachers take control of the content on their sites. Our Manila workshops continue to be our most popular. All workshops are optional and the Manila classes have been attended by everyone – school board members, support staff, teachers, students, alumni and even the superintendent have learned to publish web content with Manila!”</blockquote>
Key to me is the “every site has a different managing editor” line, exactly what we are working toward here. I sent Michael an e-mail hoping to pick his brain.

So at the behest of the tech coordinators in the sending districts I created a Weblog today for us to share ideas about district tech plans and whatever else is on our collective minds. Four out of seven people have already posted or commented. That’s a good start.

I still find this amazing. After a year and a half, the Bees site is still getting tons and tons of hits, over 500,000 since last August alone. It’s still the second site that comes up on Google when you search for the book title, ahead of B&N and even the author’s site. Now I know not every hit is a unique visitor, but there sure are a lot of people reading what my kids wrote.

Anne is using my students as models for her own students, and as usual she does a great job of highlighting the learning. Here’s her post to her kids:

You’re going to love this lesson! Emily, Jennifer, and Derrick, who were in last year’s NewsQuest group, are really going to be especially excited because today’s lesson comes from a new group of Mr. Richardson’s students. Now these students are not teaching you directly, just indirectly. They don’t even know that their good voices are going to be recognized in this way but credit is due and you are the lucky ones because you get to learn from them! Isn’t that the wonder of weblogs?

James asks a legitemate question in response to my post on Friday, I guess. “Quelle point?” I know what he’s saying, that trying to work under the restrictions that my district is imposing is kind of taking away all the good things that Weblogs make available like commenting and free expression and all that other stuff. But I guess I bristle a bit at the suggestion that because that’s the reality we should just stick to the same old paradigm for creating school Websites which usually entails the almighty Webmaster cranking out static pages in Dreamweaver or Front Page creating the same old pretty monotonous product that most school sites currently have. Yeah, I know we’re not gonna be “blogging” here, at least not at the outset. But we are going to be enlisting 40 or 50 more people in the process. And we are going to be introducing Weblogs to teachers and students and parents which will most likely generate greater use in the classroom. And we’re going to be showcasing the best practices of our teachers and students. And in doing so we’re going to be able to communicate a heckuva lot more effectively with the people in our community by using RSS and group notification and more. At least in theory. And while the process may seem cumbersome and restrictive, the excitement that many teachers are showing at the potential tells me it might just work.

This is my reality and the reality of most public schools in America. There are concerns about how we present ourselves to our publics. There is unease with letting people express themselves freely on a district owned Web space. We want to protect our students who are, after all, still just kids. These concerns are legitimate. It is not the perfect fit for pure blogging. But so what?

The point is that no one knows that Weblogs can’t be a great tool for educators even without the interaction. And I can tell you I’ll never get to where I think we can get without proving this step first. So, I’m going to stay the course…

The tentative date for the next BloggerCon is April 10, 2004 in Cambridge on the campus of Harvard Law School. The cost to attend is $0, but we will solicit contributions and sponsorships. It’s a one-day conference, following the pattern of Day 2 of the first Con, several concurrent tracks, 1.5 hour discussions led by an expert, lots of interesting people, and conversation, networking opportunities. Focus on what we’ve learned from the first half of the 2004 Presidential campaign (presumably the Democratic nominee will be chosen by then). How has journalism changed? What blogging projects are you starting? Who would you like to work with?

One of the reasons why I think Manila might be the best suited software out there for building a school Website is the flexibility and functions that it has behind the scenes. Now I don’t know about MT or the other open source alternatives, but I’m not sure how many other Weblog packages could facilitate a workable solution to the content review requirements that my superintendent has asked for. I think Manila has.

What I’ve been struggling with is finding a balance between the districts desire to ensure quality content on the site in terms of appropriateness and correctness and a process that will not be so cumbersome that teachers or staff members wouldn’t be willing to post to the site. With the help of my redesign team, I think we’ve come up with something that will work.

When someone creates a news post on any of the dozens of Weblogs we’ll have running, we’ll configure that site to send notifications to that person’s supervisor and to our Public Information Officer who can review the content right in the e-mail and reply to the author with approval or changes. Once the author receives those approvals, she goes back and publishes the post. When someone creates a story on a site, notification will be sent as usual, but the author won’t link the stories to anywhere (since that’s pretty much the only way anyone will know they were created) until she gets approvals back. For now, all commenting will be turned off, so that shouldn’t be a problem.

The teachers on the team all said this wasn’t unreasonable, and the principal and PIO felt the district’s concerns would be met by this process. I’m sure it’s going to need tweaking, but for now, I think we can move forward. And the best news is that I’ve gotten nothing but positive feedback on the look and feel of the pages. (And believe it or not, yesterday a school webmaster from a nearby district called me out of the blue and said, and I quote, “my board wants our site to look like your site. How do we do it?” Looks like I may be sending Bryan some more business.)

One of the best things about this community is its willingness to share. Jenny has put up her two recent presentations on blogging and RSS in .pdf format, and they are both worth a look if you’re thinking of doing any training on this stuff or if you just want to clarify your own practice a bit. Great stuff!
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